Implantable medical devices (IMDs) such as cardiac pacemakers, cardioverters and defibrillators (ICDs), hemodynamic monitors, and drug delivery devices, are being offered with increasing capacity for storing physiological and device performance data. The use of home monitoring instrumentation and equipment, e.g., to measure weight, systemic blood pressure, symptoms, etc., is gaining popularity for managing patients with chronic illnesses. Physiological sensors for monitoring various patient conditions such as heart rhythm, blood pressure, respiration, patient activity level, heart wall motion, and blood chemistry may operate in conjunction with an IMD and home based instrumentation for acquiring continuous or periodic physiological data for processing and/or storage by the IMD or for clinical management. Such data may be used by the IMD in automated therapy delivery or by a clinician in diagnosing or monitoring a patient condition and in his or her therapy management.
Typically, a pacemaker or ICD patient is seen once every three to six months, as long as they are not experiencing adverse symptoms, in order to collect and review data stored by the device. In many cases, no clinical action is required. The development of remote patient monitoring systems that allow IMD data to be transferred from the patient's IMD to a home monitor and from the home monitor to a central database (or from the IMD directly to the central database) allows a clinician to reduce the required number of scheduled office visits when a patient is doing well and still maintain an up-to-date review of device performance and stored physiological data.
With the unprecedented amount of clinical data available from IMDs, and in-home external medical devices, a clinician has a mounting task in tracking and analyzing each patient's data in order to recognize events or conditions of clinical importance or concern. Remote monitoring of patients potentially enables a clinician to increase the number of patients he or she is treating by reducing the number of unnecessary office visits. However, having more patients monitored remotely increases the amount of data the clinician is responsible for tracking. Therefore, as remote patient monitoring systems become more widely used and the number of patient's having implantable or in-home external medical devices increases, the need arises for remote monitoring systems and data management methods that streamline patient management workload for the clinician while enabling the clinician to maintain thorough patient care.